What Does the Seal Say? Making Meaning in Nuclear Treaty Verification

• In Event: Materiality, Meaning, Agency & Value - I

Abstract

In the world of global politics, talk is cheap. States sign negotiated agreements but a treaty without an enforcement mechanism is considered weak, because states are not expected to adhere to commitments whose materiality is merely that of ink and paper. The IAEA's safeguards system is a way to enforce or "verify" the terms of state commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970. Nuclear safeguards inspectors' at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) derive knowledge about states' nuclear programs partly through the signaling power of tamper-evident seals, which are artifacts (often made of metal, plastic or sticky paper) placed on key items in nuclear facilities such as on spent fuel or storage lockers. These "sleeping inspectors" are technical devices that provide an indicator that the item is not being misused while the inspector is absent. As object-signs of compliance, they "materialize" the state's promise, or the breaking of that promise. In a common-sense understanding, seals appear to work simply as a binary signal, but their meanings are multivalent. This paper draws on fieldwork on sealing practices at the IAEA, and multiple instances of Iran’s breaking seals from 2004-2006 that escalated into an international crisis, in order to examine the relationship between the material properties of the seal and its signifying potentialities. Bringing a semiotic perspective to the question of materiality, this article argues for a concept of “semiotic infrastructure” that permits understanding how technical devices are naturalized as merely technical, eminently trustworthy, via actors’ semiotic ontologies (Kockelman 2013).

Author

• Anna Weichselbraun, University of Vienna